ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K'é, Iina / Land, Home, Kinship, Life

Since the advent of photography, Indigenous people have been subjects, romanticized by both photographers and viewers as “authentic,” “primitive,” and members of a “vanishing race.” This photographic history is inseparably linked to the histories of museums and science, in which curators, artists, anthropologists, and sociologists took Indigenous people’s belongings and stories, captured their images and recorded their voices and fundamentally attempted to strip away their sovereign sense of identity, community, and belonging.  

Within the last two to three decades, Indigenous photographers have finally become recognized as active, generative participants in the telling of their own stories and Diné photographer Rapheal Begay is taking a leading role in this movement. 

The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and Axle Contemporary are proud to announce a partnership with photographer Rapheal Begay (Diné) and independent curator Lillia McEnaney. ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K’é, Iiná / Land, Home, Kinship, Life is a traveling, site-specific, experimental photography exhibition and museological project. 

While the Maxwell will feature an installation of Begay’s photography documenting his perspectives of these cultural themes within the landscape, the traveling portion of ALL REZ will take Begay’s photographs back to his home community in the Axle Contemporary mobile artspace.  

Comprised of a retrofitted 1970 aluminum panel delivery truck, the interior of the Axle gallery will be transformed into a welcoming space for reflection and conversation with the artist about his photographs and the cultural content held therein. As an exercise in creative place-making with the goal of fostering active storytelling, ALL REZ centers the voices and experiences of Diné community members, offering a reciprocal process of exhibition-making. 

The Maxwell invites you to a kickoff celebration with Axle Contemporary at the Museum on June 1 from 4pm to 7pm.  

From June 6 through 29, the Axle truck will tour Diné Bikéyah (the Navajo Nation) stopping at a variety of community gathering spaces in Crownpoint, Gallup, and Shiprock New Mexico; Chinle and Window Rock, Arizona; and Monument Valley, Utah. You can keep in touch with the project team while they are on the road this summer through real-time updates in our gallery and on the project website: www.allrez.net. 

To support the project, please visit our campaign at ImpactUNM. 

Download presskit here.